LONDON.- Christie’s London announced the annual sale of Topographical Pictures including China Trade Paintings taking place online from 15th October – 5th November. Featuring 123 lots with a significant focus on itinerant western artists working in the Arctic, Americas, Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Antarctic, during the great ages of exploration, trade and empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, while subjects range from the high latitudes of the Polar Regions, to the East and West Indies, from Imperial Brazil to India under the Raj, from the Cape Colony to the China Coast.

Opening the sale are two large 19th century oils by J. Hamer, of British exploring vessels frozen in the ice of the Arctic: HMS Resolute, one of the many vessels involved in the Franklin Search expeditions in the 1850s, shown abandoned in her thousand-mile drift in the Canadian Arctic before American whalers found her and returned her to Great Britain. (Lot 1), J. Hamer, The ‘Resolute’, (£20,000-30,000), and (lot 2), J. Hamer, H.M.S ‘Alert’ (estimate £20,000-30,000), is shown overwintering in the Arctic on Sir George Nares’s British Arctic Expedition of 1875 - sledging parties from the ship created a record for having travelled the furthest north. The paintings are accompanied by evocative relics from the expeditions: pieces of timber from H.M.S Resolute and a drinking flask, candle and burner from H.M.S Alert.

From the other end of the earth, the sale concludes with Sir Ernest Shackleton’s miniatures, as worn, including his Polar Medal with three clasps for Discovery (1901-04), Nimrod (1907-09) and Endurance (1914-16), (lot 123), (illustrated left), (estimate £30,000-50,000) – the decorations of the most charismatic of all the explorers from the Heroic Age in Antarctica.

Other highlights include:

The Trinidadian painter Michel Jean Cazabon’s fine view of Port of Spain, Trinidad, taken from Fort George high above the town, (estimate £40,000-60,000). Thomas William Bowler’s rare large oil of the Lion’s Head at Cape Town, (lot 42), (estimate £30,000-50,000), one of the artist’s finest descriptions of Cape scenery, and two views of Shanghai by local Chinese artists working in the 1850’s and 1860’s, showing the growth of building along the Bund just a decade or two after the port had been opened by China.

A selection of China Trade paintings including works by Spoilum, Tingqua, Lamqua and other export artists working in Canton in the early to mid-19th century, are also included in the sale. The Chinese pictures are led by six large watercolours by Tingqua including a view of his brother Lamqua’s studio in Canton, Tingqua.




(Lot 77), Tingqua, (1809 – 1870), Six Scenes taken in Canton of Lamqua’s studio and the palatial houses and gardens in Honam of the Hong merchants such as Howqua and Mowqua in the 1840’s, then perhaps the wealthiest people in the world.

Works on paper include a tiny sketch of Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania, (lot 116), by the English artist John Glover, the first landscape artist to work in Australia, (estimate £6,000-8,000). A vagrant work from one of Glover’s many sketchbooks, it is inscribed ‘Mills Plains the whole mine my house below in the plain’ proudly announcing Glover’s grant of land where he settled and painted after emigrating to Tasmania in his twilight years in the 1830’s. Other lost visions, sketched by pioneer settlers and artists in the field, include Conrad Martens’s watercolour of the Victoria Pass in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales which documents the early roadbuilding which saw the Colony soon breaking through the geographical barriers of the mountains and expanding inland. Two small and lively field sketches of the Xhosa taken by Samuel Daniell on the Truter expedition which explored north of the borders of the Cape Colony in 1801-1802 take us into Africa, (lot 41), Two sketches of Xhosa on the march, (estimate £1,500-2,000).

A selection of Chinese and Indian drawings by Samuel’s uncle Thomas Daniell take us to Canton in southern China and to northern India in the 1780s.

Emily Eden’s sketchbook takes us on her voyage to India on the Jupiter with her brother George, Lord Auckland, bound to Calcutta to take up the Governorship of India in 1836. Her sketches include life on board the ship and views taken at Madeira, Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town.

Early views of the Persian Gulf remain extremely rare and sought after, and the sale will feature topographical drawings of Muscat and the Omani coast by Charles Golding Constable (1821-1878), the artist John Constable’s son, who sailed in eastern waters with the Bombay Marine and East India Company. His extensive surveys of the Gulf in the 1840’s, 50’s and early 60’s resulted in a series of charts of the waters which remained in use well into the 20th century, (lot 48), Views of Oman, The Gulf of Oman, and the Arabian Gulf, (estimate £200,000-300,000).

A rare oil of Muscat is presented in the French marine artist, sailor and adventurer Amboise-Louis Garneray’s ‘Phare de Mascate’, (estimate £60,000-80.000). The canvas was exhibited by the artist at the Salon in 1849 and recalls his visit to Muscat and the Strait of Hormuz in the early 19th century.

Nicholas Lambourn, Head of Department, Topographical Pictures comments, ‘The Topographical Pictures sale knows no borders, so come and travel the world at Christie’s - we will take you from Pole to Pole, along the historic trade routes through the Cape, the Brazils and the Gulf to India and the East Indies, to Port of Spain and the Cuban rainforest in the West Indies, to Tahiti and the South Seas, to the Blue Mountains of New South Wales and to Canton and Shanghai in China’.

Estimates range from £400 to £300,000.